Food Fridays: History Appears on Walls and Plate at Colonial Café

The Colonial Cafe at the Hotel Majestic in Kuala Lumpur allows a visitor to fall into a long-ago world, including choosing among four “hand-me-down” dishes from the matriarch of the hotel’s owners, the Yeoh family.

I remember visiting the Hotel Majestic building long ago when it housed the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. The clean, crisp alabaster walls played host to an eclectic collection of works by leading Malaysian painters, depicting Malaysia’s kampong (village) life and colonial past.

Well, the Gallery was eventually relocated, paving the way for refurbishment of the Hotel Majestic. The hotel reopened in December, and I’m pleased that the Majestic Wing, the old part of the hotel I knew, has retained its grand neo-classical façade, with its trademark white paint, geometric forms and dramatic use of pilasters—rectangular columns projecting from the wall.

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The Colonial Café within the Majestic Wing kept to the neo-classical style with high ceilings, wrought-iron ceiling lamps, black and white photos of Malaysia’s capital city in the 1930s and large French windows.

The Colonial Café pays homage to the country’s abundant culinary resources, cultural diversity and rich food history. The menu is a mishmash of colonial British, Malay and interestingly, Hainanese.

The British, who came to then-Malaya in the 18th-century, developed lucrative trade in tin-mining and rubber plantations and attracted a slew of migrants from India and China. The British hired Hainanese cooks who then created variations of the chicken chop, Swiss rolls filled with the local kaya, or pandan-flavored jam, and mulligatawny, a peppery soup, which eventually became a part of the colonial cuisine.

Executive chef Mohammad Ali Kunhi says dishes featured on the menu are designed to take diners back to the bygone colonial era. The hotel owners’ move to recreate faithfully the style of previous eras made it easier perhaps to turn back the clock.

Shie-Lynn Lim/The Wall Street Journal

The rice balls that accompany the Hainanese chicken come with a story: The golf-sized orbs may have served the purpose of making it easier to pack food for traveling British administrators.

Mr. Mohammad Ali also adds that at least four items on the menu—Ayam Kunyit (braised chicken in turmeric), Hainanese chicken chop, traditional boiled beef and Hainanese chicken rice—were “hand-me-downs,” recipes from the matriarch of the Yeoh family, owners of the hotel and major conglomerate YTL Corp.

The Yeoh matriarch, who is Hainanese herself, “trained, taught and ingrained the group of chefs and myself the painstaking and meticulous methods in [Hainanese] food preparation at an intensive two-day session,” says the chef.

“Imagine our dismay, when she did not use any exact measurements when cooking,” he adds. “We had to slow her down and very quickly measure how many grams of turmeric she will use.”

Hainanese, like the Straits Chinese, adhere to the agak-agak principle and do not following exact measurements when cooking. Agak is a Malay word that means guessing.

The chef says he will stay loyal to the four recipes that had gone through the Yeoh generations, but adds he is experimenting with flavors through daily-special dishes he will roll out in coming weeks.

Seeking refuge from the midday sun, lunch with a friend nearly stretched to tea as we sampled a mix of Hainanese and colonial dishes. We decided to share appetizers, just so that we would have space for the main course recommended by our genteel server.

The appetizer, baked seafood crab shell looked like a hot mess as the dish was overladen with its cheesy mushroom sauce. Thankfully, it didn’t taste as bad as it looked. The seafood was a dizzying mix of crab meat, shrimp, snapper and salmon that came together perfectly. It helped, too, that the sauce had just the right amount of Emmental cheese.

Shie-Lynn Lim/The Wall Street Journal

The chicken in the Chicken Chop is pounded with a mallet to make it tender.

For the mains, poultry was the star protein, as we picked Hainanese Chicken Chop and Hainanese Chicken Rice. The chicken chop was achingly tender even though it was deep-fried to a golden hue. Mr. Mohammad Ali later said the boneless, skinless chicken meat was enthusiastically pounded with a mallet to break down the meat’s muscle and connective fibers.

The Hainanese chicken rice was, well, rice with poached sliced chicken slices. What made it different though was the unusual way the rice is presented. Rice cooked with chicken stock and pandan-leaves infused water is shaped into golf-sized orbs.

Chefs have argued over the origins of these peculiar rice servings. Some maintain that the rice was shaped because it needed to be kept warm longer. Others said it was more portable and, as the colonial British administrators traveled from one town to another, it was easier for the domestic help to pack the food. The spherical shape also made for easier eating by sailors and others working on ships and plantations.

The sailors and other workers, however, would have balked at the Colonial Café’s prices. Main courses are around MYR75-MYR130 (US$24-US$42), and appetizers start from MYR45 per person. Afternoon tea starts from MYR68.

“The ambience is superb, and it is a good place for entertaining business guests,” says Lydia Leong, 35, a corporate communications manager at a multi-national firm, who decided to try out the cafe after reading reviews on a food blog.

“But I would not go there on my own account. It is overpriced,” says Ms. Leong.

The café also serves Faggots, a traditional British meatball dish, (chef’s recipe below; have a defibrillator on standby if you are planning to cook and eat it), Spotted Dick, and a rich suet pudding among other dishes.

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